ALL AT SEA

We’ve been watching the continents and where the boundaries are and how determined Putin in particular is determined to push them back where they were when Putin was young and powerful.  In fact, we should be watching Mitch McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, or the surprise husband of Ghislaine Maxwell, Scott Borgerson.  These people are ocean people.  They have quietly become controllers of shipping and ports.

What comes after nations is oceans.  There is no system that knows where every ship is, not even with satellite oversight.  We don’t know as much about ocean space as we do about “outer” space, some tell us.  Thinking about it gives new meaning to the idea of monetary liquidity.

The useful thing about manufacturing everything in other countries on other continents is that they have to cross the ocean, which introduces all sorts of forces both in actuality and the bookkeeping of capital.  Much that travels the ocean is in bulk in the holds of ships, but in modern times we’ve invented an ingenious way to convert masses of manufactured goods into numbers:  shipping containers.  

Better than boxcars, but keeping the shape and size, the stacks of shipping containers — cliffs and canyons overshadowed by giant cranes and lit by floodlights — are a bonanza for cinematographers filming menace and shootouts.

By being uniform in size and handling, distinguished and recorded only by number codes, even bar codes that can be read electronically, shipping containers can even go from ocean liners to railroads or trucks without ever being opened, totally secret.  Even people can be shipped in them, though far from safely.  There are gestures towards trying to detect radioactivity or bomb materials, maybe cadaver dogs.

The crime series writers have a field day with this, and even they have connected it to the practice of re-invoicing or substituting lower quality goods.  Every point of moving from ship to railroad to truck, is an opportunity for deceit and swindle.  Movies of European crime shows connect this to the government, but it’s too risky in the States — maybe.  At least one of my French crime series was rumored to have been shut down by the government because it was too real.

American politicians, particularly Republican senators, are masters of diverting ideas as well as money.  They provide many red herrings, sometimes without intending to, like the constant stream of moral rot, drugs and sex.  The dark side of the Rule of Law is a lack of the morality that makes rules work and prevents self-serving profiteering, but also opens the door to blackmail and simple unclear thinking even in ordinary matters.  In the end the goal exceeds mere accumulation of money and begins to be need of control, oppression of others who might be threats.  NOW we’re on mafia territory.  Putin’s main rival is in intensive care, evidently after being poisoned.  He’s not the first.

The diversion of resource-generated funds is the bigger protectorate that has covered for local shake-downs like Trump’s concrete monopoly in a time of skyscrapers, which — by the way — is over now and people are beginning to wonder what will happen since now that we know how to commute online we know we don’t have to travel on a subway vulnerable to flooding in order to wait for an elevator to a high floor in a building that makes a good target.

In fact, there are a LOT of questions to ask:  If money is only bookkeeping, why couldn’t the government simply rule that all interest on debts should be cancelled?  Or cancel all debts?  Or rule all the offshore money that is only credits rather than actual solid existing objects to not be money anymore.

Money is a human invention, not a “real” thing.  It is controlled by social agreement which ideally asks it to abide by the Rule of Law.  The Rule of Law is not a “real” thing.  It is social agreement usually enforced by penalties and general contempt for those who don’t keep the rules.  For dictators, neither influence exists since such matters are to them irrelevant.  Their control includes mind control.

But Natural Law, like gravity, cannot be ignored away.  We are approaching the limits of resources, esp. for the rare trace elements that make the like of cell phones possible to invent.  When people hit the limits of resources, they begin to get ruthless and destroy whatever it is the way.  This can lead to the re-examination of the Rule of Law, which hits the limits of public tolerance.  But there is a little time before people figure out what’s happening.

Now we talk about the end of the oil economy rather openly.  We have not really grasped the end of food.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IigLoIPMPkM

This video is a discussion of the inequality of control of wealth that has resulted from the 400 year ago INVENTION of capital and capitalism.  The World Bank and the International Money Fund are illegitimate in the opinion of Jason Hickel; they are enforcers of inequality.

“New Economic International Order”  is an international UN - sponsored working document that dates back to 1974.   It addresses the overwhelming flow of southern hemisphere resources to the developed northern countries and seeks to balance the scales.  Much of it is unknown or undigested, to say nothing of being denied.  Since Hickel recommends it, I’ll try to catch up.  

It’s fascinating that “anthropology” is another discipline that was devised in the 19th century, grew to major importance in the 20th and then seemed to fade.  Now it comes back again as a useful way to keep track of information and theory that threatens to escape us.  We had thought all these unique “primitive” alternative cultures were mere tourist material, but now they turn out to be one of the major resources of the world.

Looked at in this way, it becomes fascinating to speculate on how much the railroad acted like a “shipping lane” to move the resources of the Blackfeet Reservation to the eastern industrialized states, at first the very materials that built the railroad: wood timbers, grazing, right-of-way, spectacular scenery, and so on.  

GROWING UP IN A CULTURAL WEB

Brigitte Bardot

Working with a group that helps boys at risk, I’ve learned a lot of sad stories about kids no one raised, kids born hooked and tough enough to survive somehow in spite of abuse and neglect.  Now these boys are working to help each other and there is at least some help for them in little groups of a dozen, though recovery and maintenance is always on the edge.

I’ll tell you about a girl in Browning, not an Indian.  I’ll call her Josie.  I knew her more than fifty years ago so the other people who knew her are either dead or too old to care very much.  Except one or two.  No one seems to know where she is -- Texas, they say.  Maybe.

She grew up in the midwest.  Her mother deserted the family when she was very small.  Her father brought she and her sibs to the Montana High Line, running away.  He was abusive and she was SUCH a pretty little blonde (just like Brigitte Bardot) that men just couldn’t resist her.  When she got pregnant, they moved to the rez to be invisible.  She had the baby, it was given up for adoption, it had a heart defect -- maybe due to her behavior which included a lot of drinking -- and died as a toddler.  If sex didn’t work to find her a protector, the story of that baby usually did.

But she still got raped, still had to leap out of cars miles from town and walk back though she’d only intended some necking, because the men figured if she’d already had a baby, she was fair game.  She never got pregnant again.  Given the time and place, she may have been sterilized without even knowing it.

She appealed to an older artist to protect her.  Slept with him. Slept with his son.  Ran off with a truck driver who wanted to marry her, but then came back.  Fell madly in love with a young handsome alcoholic Indian artist who beat the hell out of her.  She didn’t give it up until he broke her arm.  By that time the older artist had marched the two of them up to Cardston to be married, which is what she had said she wanted.  He also had helped with the divorce.  Then she left for Seattle where things were good for a while.  She never remarried.  If I told you what happened to the young artist, you’d know who she was.

If I told you what happened to the older artist, you may have already guessed.  I was his third wife and I never remarried.  Born in 1914, he died in 1999.  When Josie began to contact him for money, after I finally left in 1973, he lost interest in her.  Mostly.  She really was irresistible as an Easter chick and I thought of her as just a kid, but when I began to research, I turned out to be only a few years older.  I thought I was sooooo smart.  I thought I was living the life of Marjorie Morningstar, a novel about artists popular at the time, and finally catching up to my college classmates who had already paired off, one couple famously-- Dick Benjamin and Paula Prentiss.

But this story started at just the leading edge of the sexual revolution.  Benjamin and Prentiss made it work -- career, excellent kids, good works.  They were tight with their birth families. Josie, I suspect, has spent much of her life tending bar at descending levels of society.  Both artists married four times but that hardly accounts for the number of women who came along.

I never slept around and I never caught an SDT, though maybe herpes but I had measles as a kid, so . . .  But I’ve gone on being an underachiever sex-wise, drug-wise, out-of-step age-wise, and academic-wise.  There’s a name for girls like Josie that’s neither nice nor fair nor wise.  There’s no name for girls like me.  But we exist.

Today’s male version of Josie -- just “Joe” -- will be confronting a far greater array of ghastly dangers.  Prominent among them are meth and AIDS.  Heroin is still around, pot is almost a given, and the designer drugs are from outer space -- they could do anything to you.  These dangers are far worse than an illegitimate child or sterilization.  To survive HIV alone will take a couple of “large” a month but society will help if you can accept tight control over your life, including a rigid compliance schedule.

My own life used that older artist as an education and a springboard, not because he had influence in the world but because he had been a teacher and continued to be a teacher.  He taught “doing,” not thinking about it.  Also, he was an embracing, warm, safety-providing person so I could finish growing up.  But he was also a capturer, who kept the benefits of my growth.  When I began to separate and operate on my own terms, he began to move towards the violence of his early marriages.  But he let me stay alone on our little old ranch all winter and we stayed a little bit attached for the rest of his life.  I went back to university and have paid that seminary debt for the rest of my life.  I paid the last thousand or so with my mother’s estate.  She also paid much towards my undergrad degree though I had a full-tuition scholarship. 

In our culture people end up living on other people’s money:  kids who borrow for college, women who have babies on welfare, anyone who has HIV-AIDS. Also, houses and cars.  So many of us live as indentured servants.  The stipulations that come from outside ourselves are required and enforced as indentured servitude.  It changes our larger culture.

At some point children who remain part of a family begin to contribute back to the earlier generation, but this set of parents are so busy working or zonked on substances that the attachment doesn’t “take.”  There can be a dread of what one’s parents might need, an additional burden.  It’s easier to make distance, not even keep in touch.  But to live on debt is to return to feudalism.  After paying interest, there is never quite enough to accumulate what would be enough capital to really operate and there is always the tax bill, which is also seen as a kind of interest because people raised in this way don’t identify with the larger culture.  Anyway, tax/government capital gets drained in many small strategies along the way before arriving at its designated use.  Most obviously, the managers take a major cut.  This encourages the formation of parallel but hidden systems, sometimes criminal and sometimes at the top invisible level.  

Long ago I attended a law seminar on the exotic animal trade, which tends to be international, moving the exotic and dangerous to bored, self-important and irresponsible bourgeois people.  One speaker advised us to ignore criminal law, which is public, recorded, debated, and used by media and non-profits to create issues.  Instead, we should pay close attention to regulations because they are arbitrary, local, and can be changed without notice, often with the excuse that there is no money for longer library hours or more mental health beds.  Or that the main provider didn’t deliver the necessary drugs.  Or that the real need is for training.  These true things can be manipulated.

Brigitte Bardot

So now both Josie (if she’s still alive) and I are on Social Security.  Neither of us has children.  Both of us are fat.  Have you seen Brigitte Bardot photos?  There is a kind of cultural regulation called “morality,” which is just regulations that are not written down but disseminated through stories about behavior and what it will get you.  Karma, commandments, whatever you call it, the consequences, like natural law, are self-enforcing.

Josie’s story is well-known, Biblical.  And there have always been boys in the sex trade.  The difference is in the new elements:  HIV-AIDS and the ability of the government and big pharma to exploit it and other needs.  So far I’ve heard a lot about school debt, piled onto highly paid and highly generative people who survive to pass it on by adding it to the costs of their service.  So far, I’ve heard less about the people deeply in debt who drop out before they get to the pay-off of a job.  Or how much debt puts the encumbered into the hands and plans of those who control their jobs.  It’s a form of gambling and you know how dangerous gambling debts can be.  This is a system that is so complex and subtle that only computers can manage it, and even they make mistakes.

A metaphor.

FREE RADICALS: Part 1

On the subject of sex, beginning with the phenomenon of meiosis, which is a molecular process that enables cells -- and therefore the creatures they constitute -- to create new life forms, and then moving “up” the evolutionary sequences through the past until we get to modern humans with fully functioning prefrontal cortexes that support ethics and empathy, what is worth reflection?  We get into so much trouble, but we love sex so much.  It saves us.

In such a potentially disconcerting context, I would hope to achieve a stance as a “consistent individuated person offering an non-anxious presence” * without passing judgment or making absolute rules.  The ethic here will be one of compassion and outcome, but as frank and oddball as I can get it.  The only outcome that counts is survival and I mean by that physical survival in this world, not some other.  Sometimes it is more compassionate to end survival, and that is an essential contradiction.  “Ethics” are meant to provide counsel in such a case.  Ethics also play a role in the reconciliation of essential differences between the individual and the group.

Fighting roosters

But at what point do such values become necessary?  Mammals?  Does an echidna or platypus have erotic thoughts?  What about birds?  Clearly they do, if one counts song, dance, and combat.  So the roots of sexual instincts must go back to before both birds and mammals branched off.  They are very old, basic -- driving survival.

Bonobos

I’ll start with Neanderthals because it appears that’s when art began and I’m going to assume art and eroticism are so closely related as to be nearly identical -- certainly overlapping.  But I’ll have to stipulate that jealousy, ownership, and sneaking around are present in chimpanzees.  Not bonobos.

Species are shaped by environments, behaviors of species are shaped by society.  Species characteristics and behaviors can produce misery without death or can produce pleasures that do lead to death.  Some parts of this puzzle are universal and some parts are specific to smaller locations.  Behavior that is normal in a small town will get you killed in some big cities.  A topless female on a French beach is fine; the same in Valier will get you in trouble.

I’m going to concentrate on sex as a social and psychological matter rather than as physical acts.  The law, even religious law, concentrates on actual observable actions because states of mind and intentions are hard to detect, much less define.  They make bad law.  Things like contact, penetration, force, and choice of “other” are concrete, perceivable.  The gray areas that persist are because emotion is both physical and mental, maybe observable in the physical world but mostly only available by introspection, empathy and implication.  

It may be that we will be able to perceive ideas on some calibrator some day, but for now I don’t care whether a person gets off on wiggling their big toe in someone’s armpit or licking Jello out of someone’s belly button.  I’m interested in the emotional content of the acts.  I will want to know what flavor of Jello that was and whether the armpit was shaved, because that’s what a writer wants to know.  Because the next step is what that flavor of Jello or state of armpit means to both participants.  Sexual acts are never meaningless.

I have very little experience with physical acts except conventionally and within marriage or from movies.  But part of the reason for that is that I find my emotional skills overwhelmed when it comes to acts of sex.   I care too much.  I wrestle with attachment, bonding, fusion, and notions of identity, partly because of my own individual development and partly because of moving among different cultural contexts, including those represented in books, movies, and the theatre.  I can control my behavior effectively and conservatively, but not my feelings.  This is partly what qualifies me for writing on the subject.  That’s what this blog is: not any one academic department, not any one cultural point of view, but rather writing of all sorts.  Often experimental.  Not always “in good taste.”

For instance, I would suggest that the sexual free spirits of the world (I'm discarding the alphabet categories as too compartmentalized and therefore prescriptive) are (at least in America) occupying the same societal and psychological niche that was once occupied by the autochthonous (native) tribes who seemed so free on the land -- that is, symbols of unfettered desires, acting out, self-funding in forbidden ways.  

So those in the typical culture both desire that that role and fear it to the point of attacking it, trying to criminalize it.  Anyone sexually atypical is either ennobled or degraded, depending on how the cultures and individuals play out against each other.  Some people seek the unknown ambiguous: other people are threatened and cope through rejection, destruction.  The reasons for the difference are worth investigating.

www.derekmurphyart.com

I'm also thinking about the idea that some have gone beyond the desire for intimacy to an ambivalent but obsessive desire for fusion.  Not just obligation or dependence, but loss of identity to the point of a kind of death -- zombiedom.  Or maybe childhood.  Infancy.  Making other people responsible for us, letting them control us.  And there are people willing to do that.  They say there is a growing preference for security over freedom.  It's always a trade-off.

Pornography is an experience rather than an object (certain representations or toys) and that’s why it can’t be pinned down.  What is a turn-on to one person is a shrug to another.  Likewise, its creation can be hot or cold.  To a Victorian a well-turned piano leg may be erotic, let alone a human foot, properly shod.  Pornography may be written in a state of feverish tumescence or not, but the response is always in the brain of the beholder.  The skill of the pornographer (those that ARE skilled) is understanding what the particular trigger is and how to switch it on.

The overbearing relationship of capitalism to sexuality is everywhere in all aspects from the arts of cosmetic enhancement, to the shaping of desire, to the ownership of people used in sexual ways against their will, to the surgical businesses of gender conversion or virginity restoration -- and then, flipping all that over, the well-being of families. 

We must always provide the survival shaping of children’s identities and relationships through their sensoriums, their management of food and sleep, their clothing, the provision of safety or risk, the music they hear, their bedtime stories -- all crucial and we are right to protect it. Survival is not just a matter of employability, but also a matter of sustaining families, however defined.

Disease.  The inability to eliminate AIDS (or any other pervasive disease like TB or Hep C or cancer or other sexually transmitted diseases) may NOT due to any lack of medicine (at least not that alone) but because even with a silver bullet med, there are always social, cultural and psychological structures that prevent access, compliance, or even knowledge that a cure exists.  A killer disease like diabetes is easily prevented by individuals changing their diets, treatable with careful use of meds.  Yet the rate of compliance is about 30%, the rate of testing is low, and stigma is still attached to being fat -- let alone the threat of blindness and amputation -- so diabetes persists.  Public meals are still unadapted, candy dishes are still on desks, even churches that host Weight Watchers meetings also serve pie after services.

What about the deep relationship between war and sex?  It deserves some thought.

 *  phrase from Edwin Friedman [Rabbi and Psychologist--"Generation to Generation" his most quoted book].  He said in counseling, "remain a non-anxious presence who always self-differentiates and stays connected."  Courtesy of Mark Miller.

CHANGE IS A HURRICANE

The wind here has been blowing a hundred miles an hour.  I’m exaggerating -- the anemometers (reinforced versions) have been peaking at the high nineties.  The good part is that all the leaves are now ripped off the cottonwood and curvetting around the yard, pursued by the feral kittens.  At last the sun floods in my south windows.

I’m glib.  I can reel off words like thread off a spool but that says nothing about the quality of the strand.  Now and then I hit a level that seems more like a lid and have to struggle out from under it.  Since Div School, the most intense goad towards growth has been Tim Barrus.  His effect on me and others is that of a strong wind that rips off leaves to expose the structure underneath.  Not always comfortable.

Image from Cinematheque/Tim Barrus

Clearly economics -- in the sense of how creatures derive survival from their environment -- is at the root of basic human ideas, whether we call them science or religion.  Economics is sometimes entwined with ideas of virtue: dependability, honesty, discretion, loyalty.   The characteristics of virtue can become twisted into instruments of abuse, particularly when economics become layered into classes, the “lower” ones stigmatized and exploited to the point of death.  People who are owned.  That is, empires develop.  Where there is empire, there is revolution.

Tony Bynum, www.tonybynum.com

We are watching this on the Blackfeet Reservation day-by-day.  Over the last hundred years internal empires have developed and are now bureaucratic enough to endanger the survival of the weakest, the most stigmatized, and even to affect the lives of those who thought they were safe, respectable earners.  Part of what has destabilized them is the idea that somewhere out there is a gold strike, an oil boom, enormous profits for some if they act shrewdly.   The same promise of empire that powered the prairie clearances that put the people on reservations.

I subscribe to delaneyplace.com, which sends daily quotes from books currently causing talk.  This was today’s post:  “In his book, The Democracy Project, David Graeber writes on the Occupy Wall Street movement, and reflects provocatively on the broader subjects of democracy, revolution and change.”  He speaks of the beginnings of globalization with the sea-going colonial empires and discusses the final impacts of four revolutions:

World revolution of 1789  (The French and American defiance against kings)

World revolution of 1848   (industrialization)

Russian revolution of 1917  (universal primary education, welfare state)

World revolution of 1968  (against state bureaucracies, demand for freedom)

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez

What is politics really about?  The source of authority, the coalition grouping for power, what can be sold, who can survive.

Graeber speaks of “a rebellion against bureaucracy, conformity, of anything that fettered the human imagination, a project for the revolutionizing not just of political or economic life, but every aspect of human existence. As a result, in most cases, the rebels didn't even try to take over the apparatus of state; they saw that apparatus as itself the problem. 

"It's fashionable nowadays to view the social movements of the late 1960s as an embarrassing failure. A case can surely be made for that view. It's certainly true that in the political sphere, the immediate beneficiary of any widespread change in political common sense -- a prioritizing of ideals of individual liberty, imagination, and desire, a hatred of bureaucracy, and suspicions over the role of government -- was the political right.”

When I was in ministry in the Eighties and since it was the Unitarian Universalist denomination which is  (or was then) friendly to revolution, individualism, and all the other social movements of the Sixties, people who remembered and valued those days would sometimes ask me if I thought it was all wasted, so I had to give it some thought.  In Graeber’s phrase, it was “the revolutionizing of every aspect of human existence.”  But it was only the beginning of that.  By now even TEDtalks and the Edge can’t keep us up to speed.  I’ve backed off from all the reading about brains I was doing, because the research is moving too fast.  I barely grasp one concept and they’re already talking about the next one.

And yet “the bone chalice” of the skull is the pivot of the revolution underway: the demand to belong to oneself, if you can figure out who you are.  The problem is how to keep surviving in the midst of the battle.  How does one create a coalition if everyone in the revolution is rejecting labels or still changing and everyone resisting the revolution is insisting on affiliation and control?  

How do we understand the Post-Capitalist world that we have already crashed into through destruction?  Capitalism has given us resource exhaustion, huge broken engineering projects, global warming, and diseases released from their former sequestration in non-human creatures.  What will give us (to use the phrase of the Unilever executive Harish Manwani in his TEDtalk 1/13/14) the willingness to engage with “soap and soup,” not as purchases, not as shareholders, not even as objects, but as behaviors:  hand-washing and household cooking?  Both can save millions of lives by preventing infections and not just starvation but also defects of metabolism like diabetes.  Mostly, it’s a matter of changing focus.  Out of the lab, away from the experts.  Individual actions that support global change.  Universals shared by Manhattanites and rural Africans.

While we quarrel over whether same sexes can marry, whether marriage can be multiple, the obligations of a biological progenitor, how much society should record and interfere in the intimate lives of people, how much clothing one should wear, our actions are escaping the categories.  The Great Falls Tribune yesterday had an article about the rising rate of “co-habitation” -- unmarried people living together as sexual partners raising children.  In practical terms marriage has become a moot point.  We (including Ernest Hemingway -- remember “A Farewell to Arms”?) used to talk romantically about how marriage is only a piece of paper, irrelevant to the emotional merging of two people.  Quite so.  

But we’ve also tried to insist that co-habitation can be based on true love that is permanent, immutable, and -- though changing -- is never broken.  Mark Miller’s murder mystery gives us a major clue right off: the good guy and his wife speak their marriage vows to each other every morning.   The bad guy, a shallow hardened man, says his declaration of love only once.  When his wife asks for reassurance, he tells her,  “I’ll let you know if anything changes.”  She is shut out.  We know right there we want him to be the villain.

The balancing of independence with intimacy is always in an economic context and that can be a heart-breaker.  As always, some people are staying together in face of abuse because they need the income  while others are staying together though they may starve -- with their loving arms around each other and their children.

Change is sometimes described as a strong wind.  Real, roaring, changing everything with irresistible force.    In the night objects hit the side of my house.  The only way to sleep is to simply accept and trust -- not the safety so much as the survivability one way or another.  If a big piece of the roof blows off, if a branch blows through the window, I’ll patch and continue.  If I am killed, then I will be dead.  I am a process and processes end.  Little processes end all the time, but they are part of big processes, a flow as real as the planetary wind currents, the jet streams.  Even the solar wind.  We're infinitesimal, but we're real and we're there.  We are ALL part of the big process.

GAMING THE SYSTEM

Can Democracy work in the 21^st century?  Particularly in a capital-based international economy that is operated through the Internet?  

First of all, democracy is a concept for how decisions are made and presumes that the citizens of a country are of equal importance, similar culture, and comparable worth who will vote intelligently.  It was devised in a small country that operated face-to-face (or possibly in hand-written messages carried by messengers) and the only people qualified to be citizens were white males who owned property.  Women, slaves, and immigrants were excluded.  Compare with today:  women included, no “race” barriers, large fractions of quite different people who do not have the same values.  Two-income families with very little time, likely to change partners several times.  The society is very complex with covert layers and illegal components invested in staying hidden, but with access to major sources of money that are never taxed or disclosed.  No skin in the game.  A congress that is almost entirely lawyers.

In a capital-based economy, money is made through usury -- to be blunt.  That is, people with money loan out that money (they call it investment) in return for interest and sometimes control.  The contrast is money that comes from selling objects or services.  Some services are lowly (cleaning motel rooms) and poorly paid; some services require investment in education (indirect capital) and are extravagantly paid (psychoanalysis).  Capital has immense power to distort democracy.

Capital also gives access.  Consider that in order to get onto the internet, one must have access to the machine and a subscription, but then also make the investment of effort in learning how to use them.  Time and education are two aspects of capital.  Democracy urges that public money be used to give more people access to the machine and the subscription, but time and education are not usually provided without money, so there is a component to both democracy and capitalism that depends on individual beliefs and motivation.  If citizens believe they can learn and have access, they do much better.  But these days newspapers and bookstores are withering.

The next piece of this reflection comes from a strange source:  data-scraping in order to understand pornography, which is one way to make what Ogi Ogdas and Sai Gaddam call “the firehose of research information” focused enough to interpret.  There are two major revelations: that moralizing interferes, and that we have not looked at the reality of people because of the political dimension of moralizing.  Authorities do NOT want you to know or even look.  This is evaded on the internet, or was when we thought it was all secret, which is why there is such a firestorm over data accumulation that can be used to know a great deal about individuals or by “data-scraping” to know a surprising lot about society as a whole.   Focusing on pornography info raises the issue of censorship that distorts reality, but also presents the dilemma of discovering behavior that people will be tempted to imitate but having to show it in order to study it.

In their long painstaking exploration of something that wants to stay secret -- partly because the secrets are a source of capital and a covert distortion of democracy -- Ogdas and Gaddam were somehow able to keep analyzing and reflecting.  They kept looking for the most basic element of sexuality: what is it REALLY about?   Not in Freud’s sense or in neuroscience terms, but in human society, what is sex really about?  The answer was dominance/submission.  Who gets to be on top?  Which of course means that the initiated know how to game being on the bottom, so as to be the covert top.  Is a baby, whose mother runs to help it when it cries, controlling the mother and therefore redefining the baby as the top?  Is resentment over being controlled that way one source of violence against infants? 

Clearly in our politics today we are controlled by what is called in French (naturally, since they obsess over these things, never forgetting that they stand on scorched and bloody earth) “Ressentiment.”  It is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority generates a rejecting/justifying morality which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration.”   Like women.  Or authorities.  In schools the kids resent the teachers, in families the parents resent the kids, at work the employees resent the boss -- and it’s always a two-way game.  The politicians resent the voters and vice versa.  Sex is just a little mirror simulacrum.  Politics persists even when we’re fucking.  Who's on top?

Because the internet and the computer allow us to take advantage of tiny gradients in value, timing, and regulations, capitalists and politicians who can manage the accumulations of differences can win the game big-time.  Consider the man a decade ago who figured out how to make an ATM deposit machine round the amount down to the nearest dollar and deposit the difference (only a matter of cents) into his account.  By the time he was caught, he was a very wealthy man.  Now consider the Plan D insurer of mine, SilverScript, which was required to account for all transactions over a period of time because of suspicion that many mistakes had been made.  This resulted in me receiving a check in the amount of three cents, which probably cost something like a dollar to determine and send before I even bother to deposit it, which I won't.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing that the video games teach is NOT violence or even sex, but rather the ability to handle tiny variations in strategy that yield major returns and accrue into fortunes.  All beneath the radar of regulations.

Regulations, definitions, laws and rules can be another source of undermining democracy and even capitalism.  A good underdog who can learn all this stuff can rip off, defend or enforce it in ways that benefit those who employ them.  While I was calling around, trying to understand what I did wrong with my insurance premiums (I DID do wrong -- I admit it.), I was struck by how much boilerplate I was handed.  Before they even understood the particularities of my situation, phone answerers were spewing, INSISTING,  on a lot of stuff that was probably relevant in most cases but not in mine.  One-size-fits-all is a power assumption, because that one size is dictated and enforced by someone trying to make their own lives better.  Rigidity, blindness, denial -- they’re present in the domain of sex and everywhere else.

The other thing that struck me was that as soon as I even opened up the website of an insurance company, the phone rang with their agent on the other end, emphasizing that he or she knew how to steer me through this dangerous maze and that he or she was “licensed” which probably means that, like a real estate salesmen, they had passed a test.  I had barely typed my name into a form when they were on me like hens on a bug.  But somewhere someone is also recording my name onto a data list so that it can be “scraped” for prospects and knowledge.  They knew much about me as soon as they could pull up a screen.

It’s said that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re being followed, threatened and possibly harmed.  Likewise, just because you’re resentful about the way you’re pushed into being a loser all the time, that doesn’t mean it’s not true.  The problem is how to respond.  What do you need in order to play the game?  Can democracy persist in the face of that game?

WHAT IS CLASS? WHAT CLASS AM I?

My father played chess, which we thought was a great mark of sophistication.

About 1950 I remember a discussion at school about the difference between the working class and the middle class which caused me to come home and quiz my mother. (Who didn’t much like talking to her children about life but could be waylaid sometimes when she was doing something that made her stay in place -- “I stand here ironing” -- Tillie Olsen)

“Are we middle-class?” I asked.

“Oh, um. . .”

“Are we upper or lower middle-class?” I was pretty sure we were upper middle-class because we had so many books and my father liked classical music. We were more educated than the neighbors, though both my parents grew up on dirt-poor farms. Our Portland, OR, neighborhood at that point was mostly immigrant European craftsmen and working stiffs.

“Go change your clothes.” The rule was that you had to wear your school clothes at least twice before they went into the wash so you had to keep them clean. “Play clothes” were to be worn for a week. I had no “work clothes” and my parents had no “play clothes,” but I never thought about that. My mother wore “house dresses.” My father wore giant double-breasted suits from Monkey Wards and wool ties in Scots tartan. If you went downtown, even aged twelve, you wore white gloves and a hat. Men wore hats everywhere all the time, except indoors. Children had piano lessons, not a guitar.



For the last few years, for lack of a curriculum, I’ve been hopscotching through big ideas proposed by interesting men, some of them real people I know, some college professors, and some who turn up in magazine articles. I’m particularly interested in theories of knowledge and society: Merrill Singer, Kim Sterelny, Clay Shirky, Robert Sapolsky, Mark C. Taylor. Sometimes I go back through the shelves of books I saved to read when I retired. I have two copies of Peter Gay’s “Education of the Senses” (sub-titled "The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud.”) which suggested that I should finally read it. I think I bought it because of the “senses” more than class, but I’ve always been interested in class.

Back to my mother, still ironing and wishing she were not. “Are we high-brow, low-brow or middle-brow?”

“You didn't practice your piano lesson yet.”

Our sophomore high school teacher was the national president of the National Education Association and my high school was Jefferson High School, one of the best in the nation. We were very proud. That teacher, whose father was a prominent lawyer, brought three magazines to class. They were the television of the time. An Atlantic Monthly (quality), Life (slick) and I forget the last one which was pulp. It was not the Police Gazette, which my father hid behind the dirty clothes hamper. He kept his chess mags out in the open. Surely chess is high-brow. He played Tschaikovsky and Beethoven on his big phonograph cabinet. Gay suggests these things are bourgeois, and so was our way of thinking about them.

My mother had no time to deal with these things because she was ironing -- and cooking, and cleaning, and maintaining the yard. (She wore pedal-pushers in the yard.) She was a do-er and became a dynamic president of the PTA, a use of time my father rather resented. She went back to school, which the Depression had forced her to drop out of, and became a teacher in 1957 so she could put me through college. By then it was clear that my father was not going to rise through the classes, though we were beginning to feel financial limits. We resented this, not understanding until much later that a head injury in 1948 was mentally disabling. The promising young man, the pride of his birth family, kept his job through good will and conscientiousness, and kept us from realizing the problem by being on the road all the time.


When my elderly free-thinking junior English teacher heard that I had a scholarship to Northwestern University, she said, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Now you’ll know rich people!” I could not puzzle out what she meant. But somehow I got the idea that she meant brilliant, cultured people -- high-brows, upper classes. Actually, I didn’t run into them until later at the University of Chicago. There I learned that even the Atlantic Monthly and Beethoven were not high brow: one read journals in one’s field and listened to either Mahler or Miles Davis. But I hung onto the idea I had developed at Northwestern: that art trumped them all. If you really knew art -- even if you were not necessarily an adept or famous -- you had escaped the relentless pressure to rise through the classes. When I married Bob Scriver, I found a new relentless pressure: to be a genius, though a woman was allowed to deflect the mission by supporting a genius. He’d better be worth it.

Marriage, a certified education that guaranteed a decent job, a nice house with a well-maintained yard, and prosperity -- these were the markers of success in life. But another element crept in: service to others. I figured this out in a package deal: ministry. But the education for ministry made it impossible to have a vocational life in a rural environment. (I was a Unitarian Universalist, which requires a city of at least 100,000 to assemble a congregation with this point of view. There are no cities in Montana that big.) By this time -- late middle-age -- all I wanted was a return to the scene of my youth, not just Montana but the Blackfeet Reservation. Like a thunderclap came the Internet, which made it possible to live in a village while participating in the city of ideas.

But it also destroyed the publishing industry I had thought would justify my choices. How many people get through life by promising themselves they would someday write a book about it? Some actually manage it. Or did before the marketing department, uneducated yahoos, decided what would be published or not on the basis of hot sales, shutting out all challenges to the status quo. But did they? Ten minutes signing up for a blog and the genii is out of the bottle.

That’s where it stands now. What class am I? What is the height of my “brow”? Is this “art”? (Why must I put everything in quotes?) Am I prosperous, a success, a credit to my family? My family has dispersed. One side is so locked into the pursuit of money that they have abandoned decency and sometimes the law. The other side quietly prospers (mostly) after decades of quiet honorable toil they did not enjoy. They do not understand the collapse of publishing, which was such a dependable touchstone of the bourgeois to which we have always thought we belonged. They read novels in bed. In the Fifties their mothers made their clothes to save money; in the Twenty-tens, they create one-of-a-kind elegantly embellished jackets and garden on a sophisticated level.

But this bourgeois thing that Peter Gay is analyzing: there’s something there . . .

When Allen Ginsberg read “Howl” at Reed College in 1956, I was a junior in high school but I didn’t know about it, much less did anyone suggest I attend. At our house we had an ambivalent relationship with Reed College. It was partly because my father, who had attended ag colleges, was attracted to Unitarianism and Reed was founded by Unitarians. It was a place for free spirits and intelligentsia, what would later be called the Counter-Culture. The other side of the tension was my Presbyterian mother who had attended Lewis & Clark College when it was Albany College, denominationally supported. I suppose both Reed and Lewis & Clark were and are on the border between middle and upper classes, with Reed (high brow) tending towards the avante garde and Lewis & Clark (middle-brow) defending respectability. Their poet was William Stafford, not Allen Ginsberg.

I used the Reed College library a bit during those years, because I was reading about Commedia dell Arte and they had books on the subject. I was conscious that this was a very “enriched English” thing to do and impressed by the beautiful hushed library. I was considered a “brain,” though I didn’t get straight A’s. But I was a finalist for a National Honor Society scholarship, which meant that I took an exam at Reed while a roomful of chicks peeped in the next room. (They were someone’s psych project. Skinner was “in.”) Out of a class of five hundred, two of us qualified for this test. The other girl was rich, arrogant, beautiful, and led a life as varied (and entangled with Indians) as mine was. We ran across each other now and then over the ensuing decades but weren't friends.

Like haiku, Commedia dell Arte has become a kind of middle class favorite, along with Shakespeare, Picasso, Pollock, and Edith Hamilton’s interpretations of Greek drama, -- all popularized among the bourgeoisie by Life magazine. That’s how I knew about them. The only way to escape Life magazine was evidently to be wicked, but even then they liked Beats and Mafia and were converting them to pop culture. Their dark sides were all turned to the wall. They were not role models because they were geniuses. By this time I knew I was no genius.

If I had not gotten a scholarship to Northwestern, which was the alma mater of my dramatics teacher, I would have gone to Reed, though my mother didn’t see why Portland State College, where she went (and my cousin) wasn’t good enough. The idea was to become a teacher, nothing more or less. I always wondered what would have happened to me if I’d gone to Reed.

THE PHONE RINGS

Phone rings. I never expect it as no one ever calls. The phone is in the bedroom -- somewhere. I do not have a cordless phone because the cord is the only way to find it. The problem is that the cord is twenty feet long. Everyone asks, “Were you asleep?” not because they know where the phone is, but because I take so long to get to the phone. They’re used to people who carry their mobiles in their apron pockets or kangaroo pouches, whatever.

“This is Vanity Fair magazine.” The lovely voice of a handsome young man. My head says, “Oh, they’ve called to ask me to write an article for them.” Then, “Strange, since I haven’t sent them any queries.” Then, “Strange, since they only use their own people.”

“How are you?” Insincere. It turns out he’s trying to make me renew my subscription. I already mailed the card that day.

“Murp,” I say.

“How’s your Ground Hog’s Day going?”

“There are no ground hogs here.” Then I give him my canned lecture about ground squirrels, which come out of the ground during the thaw that generally hits about this time of year, not to celebrate Candlemas (the presentation at Temple and dedication of that good Jewish boy Jesus, conflated with some Celtic or Germanic calendar festival) but to breed. Lots of jolly ground squirrels out there cavorting in the snow, getting it on, because the gestation period for baby ground squirrels is about six more weeks of winter, which will put them out of the burrow about the time the baby new grass is ready to eat and about the time the baby new hawks are ready to eat. It’s all connected. Birth/life/death. Jesus, too.

Stunned silence. City boy. He starts to ask questions. Stops, goes back to his mission. I tell him I’m already in. He thanks me. I wonder who he tells that night. He might be a writer -- maybe he’ll put the ground squirrels in a novel.

A day or two later the phone rings again. Must be getting close to spring. This time it’s a young man with an accent calling from the University of Chicago to try to get me to make a donation so corporations will be impressed by my loyalty and therefore put in some REAL money.

Dodging, I ask, “Where are you from?”

“Malaysia.”

“What’s the temp there today?”

“Oh, it’s always about ninety.”

“What’s the air fare?”

He remembers his mission and returns to checking out my database entry. It’s the same except that I’m retired. I tell him, “Put my blog on there!”

“Oh, but there’s no space for that in this database!”

“Very old-fashioned,” I scold. He apologizes and promises to bring it up with someone. He thinks I might be really offended and since Malaysians don’t like that, he chats more in a soothing voice. He’s a math and economics major. I’m not surprised.

“Have you seen the little green parrots out at the Point?” I ask him. He has trouble understanding “little green parrots” and then is astounded at the idea when I explain that they are colony established when a shipment cage broke open and they escaped. But he promises to go look the next chance he gets. If he’d been a Div School student, we could have discussed the symbolism. But he remembers his mission and thanks me excessively and gets off. I wonder what he tells people that night. The green parrots are already in several novels.

These people electronically parachuting into my world remind me of the door-to-door salesmen of my childhood. The two most prominent were the vacuum cleaner man who demonstrated the pet-vacuuming attachment on Duncan McTavish and got so much filth out of his fur that my mother was embarrassed to ever let that guy into the house again. Anyway, her dust mop was one of her favorite weapons. Once some missionaries rang the doorbell and refused to leave until she shook the dust mop onto their heads from an upstairs window.

The other door-to-door salesman was the Watkins man, our source for genuine imitation vanilla extract which was vital to cooking in those days. Like Jello. Or Bisquick. Crisco. Considered toxic today. The formulation has probably changed anyway.

I put in my time as a visiting salesman. In high school I belonged to Junior Achievement, a company that imported and sold candles and copper polish. The reactions of the people were always interesting. We only went to the better neighborhoods and there was always a lady at home who asked a lot of questions, but not about the products -- about us. After they quizzed us closely, they usually bought something. I still remember the smell of that copper polish. It was a powder and really worked.

Earlier in grade school Campfire Girls I sold doughnuts door-to-door but we were always supposed to go in pairs. We were in our own neighborhood and the strongest memory I have was an old man whose house was sort of built into the ridge the street followed. I now realize the ridge was probably a glacial moraine and today I would say it was a hobbit house, except that it was very poor. The old man may have built it himself before zoning and building permits.

My mother questioned me closely about this old man and how we were not to go inside such houses, but he seemed harmless to me and my sales colleague. He was rumpled, a little stinky, wearing old-fashioned carpet slippers and a knit vest. He didn’t buy any doughnuts and didn’t ask us anything -- just stared at us, then closed the door quietly. Today I identify with him. Time was the glacier that was engulfing him.

That lively young men, full-grown and in graduate school, should be calling me up to ask me to do the equivalent of buying a dozen donuts means that the economy has pressed them out of true employment and made their institutions beg. I never tell them I have no money until the conversation has wound down. Sometimes they just hang up. But more often they say kindly, “I understand.” I think they do.

THE ART DEADFALL

In the course of a day I download quite a few articles, some short and some quite long. Then I stack them. Sometimes I refer to them. The theory is that I will file them. Recently I went through the most recent ones to separate out the articles about art. The stack is about five inches tall.

Recent economic events have turned attention to the “arts” in general (the first to go in small town high school budgets where sports must be preserved at all costs) and to specific uses of arts as capital. We’ve come a long way since Andy Greenshields, then president of the Browning Bank, got a good guffaw out of the idea of Bob Scriver borrowing money to buy a Rungius painting of a moose from Rex Rieke. That was 1960 or so. (Bob borrowed the money from his mother.) The painting was auctioned at the dispersal sale of Bob’s estate. Everyone will ask me “for how much” while few will say, “What was the painting like?” Because along with the commodification of everything else, we have radically commodified art.

Art is worth whatever it will sell for. That depends on how much it is wanted by people with capital. People with capital are used to taking the opinions and analysis of others who are supposed to be experts. They expect there to actually BE a dependable estimate of value. You can see where that got us by reading the newspaper. Dealing art is stick game, bone game.

So Annie Liebowitz, a top-ranked photographer, has had to pawn the copyright to all her life’s work in order to pay her mortgage debts. Institutions from universities to train stations have walked through their buildings to search out murals and old gifted paintings that might have some value and have discovered to their delight that some neglected, dark and dirty works are valued enough by “those who know” to finance the repair of those very same buildings. So they were sold. In fact, the Whitney Museum of Western Art in Cody, now part of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, was originally founded with Remington paintings that Harold McCracken bought from Remington’s birthplace museum in New York so they could fix the roof, get a new furnace and such.

Some of these sales have caused huge outcries from people who were in love with the thing-itself, the paintings. Museums, who collect art the way a hospital collects sick people, became clever -- or maybe I should say have always been clever -- about accepting art in the front, winnowing it in some warehouse, and quietly selling some of it out the back door, which outrages the original donors if they find out. In fact, the organizations of museums have framed up “de-accessioning” policies and try to keep order by threatening museums that don’t comply with expulsion from the certifying organization. This happened to the National Academy of Design, of all entities, though it has managed to get back into good graces recently.

Different genres have fared differently. French Impressionists have always been a good investment and individual paintings are known and followed through acquisitions and sale. Picasso is good but it depends on the circumstances: which one, what media, where it has been (provenance), the circumstances of its creation because “story” is a big part of every art. Abstract expressionists were very much loved as being aligned with creative outbursts, untrammeled passion, human romantic aspirations. The story of the artist’s life is important. But no one knows quite what to do with huge Jackson Pollock paintings that have changed color because of the paint used, transforming the mood and balance of the pattern. Recently an English critic, Jonathan Jones, took on Andy Warhol as a master of the flimflam, the Emperor’s New Clothes, “toxic art,” so to speak, that was leveraged out of sight, derivatives.

The secondary circle of galleries, dealers, scholars, explainers, and critics have always known how to make money from other people’s art, either by explaining it (What DOES a soup can mean?) or by certifying authenticity. (Not easy with a Pollock even with computerized analysis.) Of course, there is the usual cloud of lawyers, pointing out that reproduction rights, copy rights, “intellectual property” rights and etc. should all be pinned down in law and litigated.

Then we come to American Western art, a loose and composite genre (not always respected) that can include photos of Yosemite, self-taught scenes of authentic cowboy action, abstract American Indian canvases, wildlife portraits, the carefully thought-out easel works of Connecticut slick-magazine illustrators and classically trained Chinese immigrants. Oh, and as long as we’re at it, the artifacts of the Old West from cowboy roping cuffs to Amerindian tipi skins, the books of the Great Dream of the West, the movie posters, and so on. The buyers seem to like prints as well as originals as long as the reproductions are by a process with a fancy name.

So how is a person supposed to figure all this out in terms of their own capital investments? I once took a class from an art professor in Cheney, Washington. He said there are two ways for an artist to “make it,” that is, sell enough art to consider it a living. The first was to hop on every trend, watch every auction, check stickers in every shop, walk the museums and galleries and engage the experts -- then provide what the market wants. This will mean some drastic changes over the years.

The other way was to follow your heart, enter the spell, go to the studio with focus and diligence to find the path that is yours alone. If you have the fortitude to do that long enough, he promised, you will be great. This is not bad advice for a buyer as well.

The real value of that original Rungius painting of a moose couldn’t be measured in money. It was in New Brunswick, one of those early dark green and gray paintings, with fallen logs making the canvas-crossing X that was always the structure of Rungius’ composition. The moose is stepping carefully through the deadfall, watching the horizon under a silver sky. It always hung over the little spinet piano against a grey wall, in a room with dark green drapes. We would sit looking at it every day. There is always in that kind of Rungius painting a spot of bright red, small but vital, like our hearts.